The David Hume Collection

By David Hume and Steppenwolf Press

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, scepticism, and naturalism. Hume's empiricist approach to philosophy places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes as a British Empiricist. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Against philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passion rather than reason governs human behaviour. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is founded solely in experience.

Hume influenced utilitarianism, logical positivism, Immanuel Kant, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and other movements and thinkers. Kant himself credited Hume as the spur to his philosophical thought who had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers".

The David Hume Collection by Steppenwolf Press brings together the writings of one of the greatest philosophers the world has ever known, featuring:

A Kind of History of My Life
A Treatise of Human Nature
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
The History of England
The Natural History of Religion
My Own Life
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Essays
and
Personal Correspondence

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steppenwolf Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9788834183199

David Hume

David Hume was an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist, and the author of A Treatise of Human Nature, considered by many to be one of the most important philosophical works ever published. Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at an early age and considered a career in law before deciding that the pursuit of knowledge was his true calling. Hume’s writings on rationalism and empiricism, free will, determinism, and the existence of God would be enormously influential on contemporaries such as Adam Smith, as well as the philosophers like Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Popper, who succeeded him. Hume died in 1776.